This week Facebook announced the launch of a new technology to prevent the use of ad blockers on their desktop website. This feature was implemented to protect the incredible revenue generated on their ad platform. Facebook execs lauded the tech and indicated that it would be extremely difficult to defeat without providing a significantly slower user experience on the site. Unfortunately for them, that didn’t last long.
Just about 48 hours after Facebook’s announcement AdBlock Plus, one of the leading ad blocking plugins, announced that their community had found a workaround to provide a speedy, ad-free experience on the social network. As a user of ad blocking tech in my personal browsing this is a welcome announcement, but there are two other takeaways here that are pretty important.